White Gold

The title represents the name given to ivory by Chinese traders. The film investigates the current status of African elephants, today’s unprecedented poaching levels, and the international ivory trade.

The film is being presented from Kenya’s perspective and will be a powerful voice reaching out to the consumer nations of the world to raise awareness of the implications of the ivory trade – for people, for elephants, for national economies and security.

The film follows the ivory trail from source to consumer, covering issues never before seen on film and examining the security and economic implications of the illegal ivory trade – and the potential future impact should international ivory trading be legalized by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).

The film uses the Northern White Rhino (a species now considered extinct in the wild) as an example of how quickly entire wildlife populations and even species can be lost. If we are not vigilant, the same fate could await the African Elephant.

As a conservation education tool, the film ‘White Gold’ has two key objectives:

When broadcasted in Mandarin and other languages across the Far East, to create awareness among the ivory consumers in China (the world’s largest consumer of illegal wildlife products) and other countries in order to slow the demand for ivory – to support the conservation community’s efforts to make the buying of ivory socially unacceptable (much as was achieved with the fur trade in the West);

As a free educational resource disseminated across 46 African countries through AEFF’s established distribution network that reaches hundreds of millions of people across the continent.

Not only elephants and their habitat (also shared by other wildlife) will benefit from the effects of this film. The security and stability of African countries are at stake (for a legal ivory trade would create an “ivory rush” and a proliferation of weapons uncontainable by most African countries with their limited resources), with implications for people’s personal safety, businesses, investor confidence and the tourist trade (which in many African countries is the biggest employer and a major foreign exchange earner). Ivory is also increasingly being used as an untraceable form of revenue for subversive organisations, with worldwide security implications.